Monday, April 14, 2014

It's the beginning of the end, which means things are as they always have been.

The final season (or the first half of the final season,
whatever you want to call it) of Mad Men
started on Sunday night. I had been anxiously anticipating the season premiere,
an episode called “Time Zones”, for months. Last week I’d read as many “season
premiere first impression” articles as possible in an attempt to quench my
thirst for all things Mad Men. I was
primed and ready for Season Seven.

However, I wasn’t in front of a TV when “Time Zones” aired
on AMC. I was riding on Interstate 87 outside of Albany in the passenger seat
of a 2013 Jeep Wrangler, slugging coffee, chomping on gum and listening to old Whiskeytown songs.

You see, I was on my way back from visiting one of the great
friends of my life, perhaps the great friend of my life in Enosburg Falls, Vermont. I
had gone up with another buddy of mine for a long weekend.

My friend works as a first responder at the ski mountain Jay
Peak and lives on a farm in Enosburg. Chaz and Olga, a friendly and lively
couple, run the farm. They harvest sap from maple trees to make maple syrup.
They also sell eggs and Olga—of Russian descent—arranges flowers for weddings.
Their son, Lucas, lives on the property and helps them wherever possible.

In mid-March and early April, when the temperatures rise and
the snow begins to thaw, the sap in the maple trees starts to run. This is
known as “sugaring season.” All along the landscape of rural roads in Vermont’s
Northeast Kingdom, sugar houses—small barns with their roofs raised slightly in
the middle—pour smoke out into the mild, lavender air. If the sugar shack is
right, people gather around with beers and watch logs loaded into large,
burnt-black, furnaces; stand on wood platforms and look at boiling sap; walk in
dull, hay-colored woods and look at lines and lines of blue, black, and grey
line run amongst maple trees—dry lines, wet lines, vacuum sealed tunnels in the
quiet, bare woods.

My friend helps with the sugaring operation. He lives in a
wood cabin without insulation or plumbing. He uses an old iron, wood stove to
stay warm during the winter when the temperature drops to negative twenty
degrees. He and his girlfriend listen to records and distant radio stations on
terrific sounding wood speakers and sleep in a lofted bed. They can walk
through the woods and hear when a sap line is leaking. They have an outdoor
shower that is gravity fed by a small pond up on a hill on the farm. Their
life, the things they know, the way the communicate and endure and understand
so deeply the tendencies and speaking patterns of the people that populate
their world amazes me and makes me sip beer in awe while I spout absurdist one-liners;
using humor to shield my insecurities about the life I lead.

When it was time to leave my friend, to take my mud-stained
boots, sweating corduroys and red, spring-sunburnt face away from his life on
the farm, I felt a great sadness. We’d had fun skiing and drinking and joking
and I had so enjoyed immersing myself in his life—and reveling in his presence in my life—for just a few short, forty-eight hours, that I couldn’t
help but mourn the end of my little trip.

We said goodbye in the golden afternoon light of Sunday
afternoon along the ridge that the farm rests upon, the dogs padding around our
feet and rolling in dirt and old snow. And it was time to get on the road.

When Mad Men’s
final season premiered on AMC, I was sitting next to my buddy as he drove down
87. I was buzzed on caffeine and feeling shitty that I didn’t know how to
handle a manual transmission and thus couldn’t help with the driving duties. I
looked out the window at the full moon and made a vow that my life back in New
York would be different. That I’d wean myself off my addiction to information;
fight my compulsive need to be reading something about something at all
times—even while I’m watching something else! I’d stop being so petty with my
jealousies and hang-ups; my creative competitions with friends; I’d stop
feeling shitty about work.

I felt a sense of victory, but that feeling faded and I was
left with my life.

Mad Men is my
favorite show because that’s what it’s about. You think things are going to
change and you try to change yourself or your position in life, but all you are
left with is your life. It’s decisions, it’s desires, its learning how to be
happy with what is in front of you. And victories turn to status quo in a
second.

When Peggy fell to her knees in her apartment at the end of
the episode, I was right there with her. There are so many times when I’ve left
work after a ten or eleven hour day and stood in the subway and felt so
completely dissatisfied with myself and my life that I’ve wanted to cry. I’ve questioned
every decision I’ve made. I’ve wondered what I could have done to bring myself
to this place.

I only feel that way because I fail to understand that life
is just decisions. They won’t always be the right one or the best one, but they
leave you in a certain place and all you can do is make the meaning of that
place as you go along. Don and Megan were half asleep on the couch in Los
Angeles when that Disney, fairy tale show came on the screen. Don’s face was
basked in the TV’s glow and he looked at the fairy tale font on the screen,
some tale being told from an old book—a television prop.

There is no story or narrative for your life. You make
decisions and you are left facing the consequences. You can try to hide in some
kind of communal sex family like Roger, but you’ll be left lying awake,
wondering how you just came from a breakfast where your daughter told you that
she “forgives” you; you can try to hide in work like Peggy, but sometimes you
are going to work for a boss you disagree with on a base level; you can watch
TV all night like Don does in New York, cast an unsatisfied look at your bottle
of Canadian Club and only find some small level of solace in the harsh
discomfort of sitting on a frozen, high-rise Manhattan balcony.

Life doesn’t have a final season. Things aren’t cleaned up
for us. We make decisions and end up in Enosburg Falls, Vermont or Cobble Hill,
Brooklyn and we continue to have the same problems—those problems being solely
the uneasy way we exist with ourselves. And all of our decisions begin to turn
inward and we ask if we’ve ever done anything right ever.

We’re only one episode into Season Seven and this is already
the stuff we’re dabbling in. Mad Men
is the best show on television. There is no room for discussion.